The far right accused Pizza Hut of ‘going woke’ and demanded the company be canceled after they selected a featuring a book about a drag performer in its kids literacy program in the US known as Book It. Texas Paul dissects The GOP’s homophobia and racism.
As I said in a recent post these hyper religious anti-LGBTQ+ should be careful complaining about men with beards reading and talking with children. I again post several pictures of their savior god who is in a dress, wearing a beard, surrounded by children. What is it these people think is happening in public with children and drag performers? It is only dress up. It is not a stip and have sex show. Plus when they do the drag queen story hour again everyone is in public and they are just men in costumes reading to kids. And why do these assholes think they get to tell everyone else what they can do and can not do when it comes to raising their own children. These are the same assholes who claim no one can make them vaccinate their kids, no one has the right to demand their kids wear masks at schools. Yet they feel entitled to tell you what event you can allow your child to attend. Entitled wannabe kings of the world or as I call them big asshole jerks. Hugs
From Texas state Rep. Bryan Slaton:
The events of this past weekend were horrifying and show a disturbing trend in which perverted adults are obsessed with sexualizing young children.
As a father of two young children, I would never take my children to a drag show and I know Speaker Dade Phelan and the rest of my Republican colleagues wouldn’t either.
Protecting our own children isn’t enough, and our responsibility as lawmakers extends to the sexualization that is happening across Texas.
I promised my voters that I would stand up for their values and fight to protect Texas kids.
I was re-elected on that promise and I intend to keep it by authoring legislation to defend kids from being subjected to drag shows and other inappropriate events.
I look forward to working with my colleagues to pass this important legislation.
Slaton, who is fond of making public appearances carrying an assault weapon and wearing a belt of ammunition, first appeared on JMG in March 2021 when he introduced a bill making abortion a death penalty crime for doctors and even women who undergo the procedure.
Earlier this year he introduced a bill requiring genital exams for trans athletes in public schools.
As I reported yesterday, extremists on Saturday mobbed and attempted to enter the Dallas gay bar hosting the event that has enraged the usual haters.
Drag shows are no place for a child.
I would never take my children to a drag show and I know Speaker Dade Phelan and my Republican colleagues wouldn’t either.
Reminds me of the line in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” from Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer’s character): “Isn’t it interesting how fascists always abuse the word ‘freedom?’”
Parents have the FINAL WORD on how they raise their propertymini-mes children!!!!
Unless it’s something the most holy and righteous straight-and-narrow Rethuglicans declare to be perverted and evil, then parents absolutely CANNOT be trusted!!!!
are you going to ban Milton Berle, Flip Wilson (Geraldine), Laugh-in, The Three Stooges, all sorts of 1930s-2000’s Broadway plays, college plays, school plays, and the like to “protect” kids from “drag queens” ?
Your wife is Asian ..guess who plays female roles in Japanese and Chines plays from long ago? Yep — men.
But sure, walk around with police-killing bullets and a weapon of war on your shoulders … and watch the innocents get slaughtered, doing nothing in the legislature, except make it easier to destroy our youth …
The founding fathers hated the idea of a political class ruling the country. For them that was too close to a king and royalty. They never wanted a permanent ruling class in the US instead they wanted a government for the people by THE PEOPLE. She has been in public elected office for 52 years and before her impairment was made public she said she was going to run again. WTF! She is 89 years old. Is there no younger people fit to lead the country, fit to hold those seats? Think of it. She started when she was 36 years old in 1969. Can anyone her age really grasp the differences in the country as it is today, the needs of the people in their 20, 30, and even 40s? Can she of the other nearly 90 year old people in congress relate to culture as the newer generations are living or do they still try to force the people to live in the hey day of their prime, the world they knew when they were 20, 30 or 40 years old? How can someone who was 40 in the 1970’s relate to the modern world of 2022? How can they understand the needs of society today, when the traditions they grew up with were so different? Hugs
In the middle of their deep dive into Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s decades in office and her legacy, New York Magazine drops this observation:
Feinstein, who turns 89 in June, is older than any other sitting member of Congress. Her declining cognitive health has been the subject of recent reporting in both her hometown San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. It seems clear that Feinstein is mentally compromised, even if she’s not all gone. “It’s definitely happening,” said one person who works in California politics. “And it’s definitely not happening all the time.”
Reached by phone two days after 19 children were murdered in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in late May, Feinstein spoke in halting tones, sometimes trailing off mid-sentence or offering a non sequitur before suddenly alighting upon the right string of words. She would forget a recently posed question, or the date of a certain piece of legislation, but recall with perfect lucidity events from San Francisco in the 1960s.
Dianne Feinstein fought for gun control, civil rights, and abortion access for half a century. Where did it all go wrong? @rtraister reports https://t.co/fFv1ccDmOh
The Arizona Senate candidate has a unique theory about why there’s a gun violence problem in the United States.
Roger Sollenberger
Political Reporter
Gage Skidmore/The Star News Network/Wikimedia Commons
Tech investor and Arizona Republican Senate hopeful Blake Masters acknowledges that the United States has a gun violence problem. But he also has a theory about why there’s a problem—it’s “Black people, frankly.”
Masters boiled the issue down in an April 11 interview on the Jeff Oravits Show podcast, telling the host that “we do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence.”
“It’s people in Chicago, St. Louis shooting each other. Very often, you know, Black people, frankly,” Masters clarified. “And the Democrats don’t want to do anything about that.”
It’s unclear why Masters—who has pushed the baseless “great replacement” conspiracy theory narrative—felt compelled to single out Black people. Moments earlier in the interview, during a discussion about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, Masters told Oravits that “most Americans just, you know, just want to stop obsessing about race all the time,” adding that “the left’s biggest tool in their toolkit is just to divide people on the basis of race, and that’s really messed up.”
Republicans frequently cite urban gang violence, most often in Chicago, in attempts to tap out of the gun control debate. While their redirections are often as misleading as they are cliche, those officials aren’t always as forthright as Masters about the racial undertones.
But Masters, whom the white nationalist website VDARE fêted last year as an “immigration patriot,” was quite clear about his vision of two Americas.
After pinning gun violence on gangs and Black people—and saying, falsely, that Democratic administrations “don’t want to do anything” about gang shootings—the Stanford-educated libertarian went on to complain to Oravits that gun control efforts target “law-abiding people like you and me.”
“When they ban ‘ghost guns’ and pistol braces, that’s all about disarming law-abiding people, like you and me, that’s what it’s about,” Masters said, referencing government efforts to crack down on the surge in privately made, untraceable firearms. “They care that we can’t have guns to defend ourselves.”
Masters—a Bitcoin evangelist who routinely hawks automated surveillance technology developed by his benefactor, billionaire tech mogul Peter Thiel—claimed that “it’s pretty rare” for homemade firearms to show up in criminal activity. But his information might be outdated.
Ghost guns aren’t just built and owned by technocrats, to be appreciated as physical instantiations of political theory. They’re also on the rise among criminals, including in gang activity, according to officials with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, as well as fresh police data VICE published this week, which documents a 90 percent increase in seizures last year.
The day of the Oravits interview, President Joe Biden announced a rule change to address the ghost gun problem. In response, Masters tweeted a photo of his own “ghost” gun kit, claiming that he would be a “felon” under the new rule if he made “another one just like it today.”
That’s not accurate.The Biden administration has not banned those weapons, which don’t have serial numbers and can be 3D-printed at home. The new rule doesn’t make it illegal to build your own gun; it applies to people who sell gun kits. Those sellers are now required to become licensed firearms dealers, run background checks on buyers, and include serial numbers on their kits.
The rule also targets violence in urban areas—a sore point for Masters—where ghost guns are multiplying.
Last year, police seized more than 225 of the weapons in New York City, along with 300 seizures in Baltimore and 455 in Chicago, CBS News reported. And government data shows that law enforcement agencies reported recovering 20,000 suspected ghost guns in criminal investigations last year alone—nearly as many seized over the previous four years combined.
A Masters campaign spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment.
Back in the interview, Masters—who has likened federal campaign disclosure laws to Kristallnacht—veered into conspiratorial territory.
Democrats “don’t like the Second Amendment,” he said, because “it frankly blocks a lot of their plans for us”—an unhinged, fact-free statement that liberal officials have cooked up a plot to physically force conservatives to comply with some unarticulated maleficent regime, but have been bayed by fears that a constitutionally endowed populace will shoot them if they try.
Masters also tossed out misleading red meat gripes about crime in West Coast cities Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Masters lived much of his adult life before relocating to Arizona ahead of his Senate bid.
Those cities, he told Oravits, have “legalized crime,” claiming that “you can’t get arrested if you smash someone’s window and take a purse or an iPhone.”
It’s not immediately clear what Masters was referring to, but the riff appears to be a nod at Prop 47, which California voters passed at the state (not city) level nearly eight years ago. The Prop 47 coalition included Democrats along with libertarians like Masters, who wanted to roll back felony punishment for lesser offenses, including property crimes like shoplifting.
Prop 47 didn’t “legalize crime,” but reclassified certain felonies as misdemeanors. But after the recent rise in property crimes such as “smash and grab” robberies, most Californians support tougher sentencing laws, including overhauling parts of Prop 47.
“They talk about crime but I find it crocodile tears,” Masters said, an apparent reference to Democratic outrage over an unending drumroll of domestic massacres. “Because if they were actually tough on crime they would get serious about gang violence.” (Masters himself did not put forward a solution to gang violence in the interview.)
Masters, 35, is a fairly new name in GOP politics, but he has benefited from powerful friends—including his mentor, Thiel, who threw $10 million into a super PAC backing his primary bid.
Thiel’s support went a long way to landing a recent endorsement from former President Donald Trump, who officially blessed Masters on Thursday. It wasn’t a surprise—Trump has a score to settle with Masters’ top opponent, Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich, who resisted Trump’s pressure to invalidate his state’s 2020 election results.
Masters is fiercely anti-tech while being fiercely pro-tech, backs a national abortion ban, claims Democrats want to “import a million people every year to replace Americans who were born here,” has said that the media and big tech “conspired to manipulate the 2020 election”—which he claims “Trump won”—and calls the gender pay gap a “left-wing narrative.”
(The “new right” crowd also counts another Trump-endorsed Thiel protege: Ohio Senate candidate JD Vance.)
Masters won Trump’s endorsement on Thursday, nine days after an 18-year-old used a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle to slaughter 19 elementary school students and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.
“Blake will fight for our totally under-siege Second Amendment, and WIN!” Trump wrote in his announcement. An hour later, Biden called on the country to support an array of gun control measures in a primetime national address.
Rarely are Republicans so explicit about their bullshit counterarguments. But please read this whole report, because there’s more to this guy. What Masters says is false and deranged, frankly
— Roger Sollenberger (@SollenbergerRC) June 6, 2022
Explosions shook the city of Kyiv on Sunday morning after Russia launched its first attack in the capital in over a month. CBS News foreign correspondent Chris Livesay joins CBS News’ Ali Bauman with more on the attack.
This is how much the rabid right gun fetishists will go to prove their love of both racism and guns. Pudgy boy child who took an illegal gun to a BLM protest with the idea of play a enforcement officer ordering people around until he ended up shooting three people, is their idea man? This man has no other accomplishments in his life other than arrogantly trying to push people around and then shooting three people, killing two of them. He is not famous for anything else but that. Yet that alone makes him the alpha male in the rabid right wing gun circles. Put the idea of rabid right wing Republican base members carrying guns at polling places in an all new light doesn’t it? Hugs
“I just wanna introduce Kyle by saying this, we talk a lot about the kind of man you should want be attracted to. Men, your number one goal is to protect your family and to stand strong in the face of opposition from culture and evil. And Kyle Rittenhouse is a man who does that. God bless Kyle Rittenhouse.”
That’s how Rittenhouse was introduced this weekend at Charlie Kirk’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit. Rittenhouse then thanked the audience for being “strong women.”
Later at the event Rittenhouse claimed to be inspired by Johnny Depp to sue his online detractors and journalists for defamation.
Kyle Rittenhouse is introduced at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit as the ideal catch for a husband: “I want to talk a lot about what kind of man you should be attracted to .. Men’s #1 goal is to protect your family .. and Kyle Rittenhouse is a man who does that.” pic.twitter.com/WLjIdQhc6d
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) June 5, 2022
Kayleigh’s sister Ryann introduces her new “conservative dating app” at the Young Women’s Summit called, ‘The Right Stuff’ launching this summer. “It will give you a chance to meet a conservative guy that you could potentially get married to.” pic.twitter.com/lWBSaRVoTE
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) June 5, 2022
Kayleigh McEnany says when she was supposed to be at the podium for her first press briefing, she was crying in her office. They then put her parents on speaker phone and they prayed with her. She then got on her knees in the bathroom and prayed, then she felt ok to do it. pic.twitter.com/wdDsKHVXaN
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) June 5, 2022
Performative trollery is all they’ve got and their new murder-mascot has no fucking clue he’ll likely end up dead of an OD someday in a seedy motel room, after they’ve discarded him.
This state cannot adequately fund their schools now and just wasted billions on a border stunt that failed. But they will do anything other than talk about how easy it is to get a gun in their state to shoot school kids. Hugs
Patrick said he wants police in as many Texas schools as possible to have bulletproof shields before the fall. He’s asked other state leaders to move around money in the state budget to make it happen.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, center, has asked state officials to move $50 million in the state budget to provide bulletproof shields for school police officers before the start of classes in the fall. Credit: Sergio Flores for The Texas Tribune
Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called on state leaders Friday to move around $50 million in the state budget to buy bulletproof shields for school police officers following a mass shooting last month at an elementary school in Uvalde where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers.
“I am asking the Speaker of the House to join the Senate members of the Legislative Budget Board and me next week in a budget execution letter to move $50 million to either the Governor’s Office or Department of Public Safety (DPS) to begin buying these bulletproof shields as soon as possible so every member of school law enforcement has one,” Patrick said in a statement Friday afternoon. “This will begin the funding necessary to eventually provide bulletproof shields to all law enforcement.”
Patrick’s request would require the approval of House Speaker Dade Phelan and other House members of the state’s Legislative Budget Board. But because lawmakers have already appropriated the money for the two-year budget cycle, it would also require letters from the agencies where the money would be taken certifying that the transfer would not negatively impact their functions.
Patrick said he would send a draft letter Monday and asked Phelan to act quickly. Phelan’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
State Republican leaders have already signed off on twosimilar transfers worth about $1 billion this year to send money to Gov. Greg Abbott’s costly border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, which was running out of funds. Patrick, who approved those transfers, said the same should be done to provide bulletproof shields to school police officers.
“We have used transfer authority this year to spend billions on the border. We can surely find this amount of money to better protect our kids,” Patrick said, adding that there are “several sources in the current budget that can be tapped to provide this funding.”
Patrick did not name those sources.
During the last of these budget transfers in April, DPS, one of the agencies that Patrick is suggesting should be given money to pay for the bulletproof shields, was forced to relinquish $160 million of its approved budget to keep Operation Lone Star going. Without that transfer, leaders for the Texas Military Department, which has assigned 10,000 service members to the mission, would have been unable to continue the operation.
Patrick said the state should start by providing bulletproof shields to all school police officers and then expand to all law enforcement officers. The state could experience supply-chain issues in obtaining the shields, but it should push to get “every quality shield we can find.”
“This straightforward solution can begin right away,” Patrick said. “If all responding law enforcement had bulletproof shields last week, lives may have been saved.”
Patrick’s plan continues the trend in the state’s Republican leadership of responding to mass shootings by pushing for more teachers to be allowed to use firearms in schools and funding school police. But the law enforcement response to the shooting has been roundly criticized after state and law enforcement officials gave inaccurate information in the initial aftermath of the shooting that has since been debunked.
Police responding to the shooting took more than an hour to engage the gunman who was inside a classroom shooting at children and teachers. The police chief for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, Pete Arredondo, determined police were dealing with a “barricaded suspect” and that the children were no longer in danger, state officials said. The leader of DPS later said it was the “wrong decision, period.”
Patrick said that if every police officer in the state had a bulletproof shield, “their ability to respond to an active shooter situation would be greatly enhanced.”
Texas lawmakers have responded in a similar manner in the past. After a gunman with a high-powered rifle ambushed and killed five Dallas police officers in July 2016, state lawmakers responded by allocating $25 million in the state budget for police agencies across the state to buy bullet-resistant vests that could withstand rifle ammunition.
Last session, after two DPS troopers were fatally shot through a windshield in their patrol car, lawmakers agreed to foot the bill to bulletproof windshields in DPS patrol cars, Patrick said.
While a huge crowd was gathering in Fair Park for the first day of Dallas Pride weekend and the Miller Lite Music Festival, a handful of right-wingers hit The Strip on Cedar Springs today (Saturday, June 4) to protest …. well, something.
The protesters reportedly gathered first in front of Mr. Misster, at the corner of Cedar Springs Road and Reagan Street before Dallas police officers forced them to move across Reagan to the sidewalk in front of the fire station.
Activist Cannon Brown, who was at the scene, said the protesters were there to rally against a drag queen story hour happening at Mr. Misster. “They were there to scream at kids,” Brown said on Facebook, noting that some were Roman Catholics who were “actually behaved and just chanting the rosary. It’s the Infowars/fascist crowd that is problematic.”
The group, described by Brown in a Facebook post as “christofascists,” carried signs vaguely resembling the Texas flag and the U.S. flag along with a large white flag with some sort of X symbol in red, and a gold-and-white flag with some symbol in the center. The size of the group has changed over the course of their protest, but Brown said it averaged about 20.
Photos show one protester carrying a sign declaring “confuse a child, abuse a child,” and another had a sign shouting “stop groomers.” Yet another demands, “Stop exploiting our kids.” And, in what is apparently a swipe at the rainbow power of Pride Month, one woman wore a black T-shirt with a block of rainbow colors saying “rainbow revival.”
— Tammye Nash, photos by Chad Mantooth
From Joe My God the right wing religious bigots couldn’t resist lying.
A spokesperson for the extremists claimed to Dallas’s ABC News affiliate that police removed children from show. That didn’t happen. The bar reports having gotten hundreds of threatening emails. Some of the tweets below are from far-right extremists.
I want to respond to the religious asshole in the above video. He starts out making a claim about doing something to between boys legs, then he makes a comment about letting children near men in dresses. Has this pious asshole threatening parents with children which is traumatizing the kids ever looked at the pictures in his church? What does he think Jesus and the disciples wore, three piece suits?
So I do not want to hear anything more about men in dresses talking with or reading to kids.
Kelly Neidert is the ignorant trumpist that is causing trouble in Dallas Texas. Shes the one you will see protesting here in our gayborhood because she has HATE in her heart. Remember God is watching you. pic.twitter.com/zGB1qUH5Ei
If they didn’t blame us they would have to face the fact that they have been enabling child predators in the name of their worthless non-existent god. Introspection isn’t their strong suit.
Hell, if these folks didn’t have external targets to focus their hate and measure their “moral superiority” against, they would be tearing each other apart. (I’ve seen it first hand.)
Lol, what was your first hint. Maybe the fact that 75% of rethuglicunts actually believe that the election was stolen! Proof positive that if you say a lie enough times it is believed regardless of facts. This is the same ploy they are using to paint the LGBTQ community as those grooming children to become gay. As if it were a fucking choice in the first place! All the while they hand over their kids to the real groomers, the churches, where they are indoctrinated and scarred mentally for life by the daily harrowing experiences they are forced to endure by the church community. What is worse is that the people they most should be able to rely on for protection, their family, are the very ones that force them into it! Seriously hating what this country is becoming.
Does anyone remember Tildeb trying to claim that “Every biologist agrees that male / female are determined by Gametes”? I showed that it was clearly wrong. Now I know where that comes from. Hard right anti-LGBTQ+ dogma. *** Edited because I got the information wrong. Thanks to Lilly who let me know I was wrong in the nicest manner I have ever been corrected. Matt Walsh did not do these things to his own child, instead he has championed Jeff Younger who did do these things. Matt Walsh does talk about this story and issue constantly in his crusade against trans people and his hate for trans genderism. *** Matt Walsh champions Jeff Younger who put his own child in the way of suicide to try to deny them their gender identity. Jeff Younger has been in years long court battles with his female spouse who has custody of the child and is a pediatrician. Jeff Younger has been so abusive to the child the court has stopped allowing him to have visitation with her. Jeff Younger violated every court order to let the child socially transition including taking the child to have her hair cut very short against a court order to do that very thing, forcing her to wear pants and male oriented clothing, throwing out any of her female clothing, forbidding her and punishing her if she used female pronouns or her female chosen name. Then when Jeff Younger lost more and more in court he pushed the rabid right wing maga crowd on his wife and child after three different child gender specialists agreed the child should be allowed to socially transition. Jeff Younger is more than rabid; he is totally abusive to the ex-wife and the child.
Matt Walsh is also rabid against trans people and the idea of being trans at all. He really has rage on this topic. He seems driven. This where that idea of gametes comes from. So to those who think that Tildeb was an honest participant in the discussions on trans people, this sets the record correct. Remember Matt Walsh is not a doctor nor biologist, he just plays one in his mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Walsh_(political_commentator) Everything I on gamete and biology said turns out correct. Hugs
Matt Walsh is garbage.
John Iadarola and Brett Erlich break it down on The Damage Report. Read more here: Matt Walsh used trans people’s Instagrams in his transphobic documentary—it’s already sending hate their way https://www.dailydot.com/debug/matt-w…
“A transgender man says that Matt Walsh is using his image without permission for a transphobic documentary. He also says that Twitter refused to remove the trailer for the documentary in which his photo appears.
The Daily Dot previously reported that Walsh was behind a fake company duping trans people into being interviewed for a documentary. Walsh tweeted the trailer for that documentary, What is a Woman?, on May 14. The right-wing site Walsh works for, the Daily Wire, produced it.
In a follow-up tweet, Walsh added that they intentionally chose to release the documentary on the first day of Pride Month.
Walsh is a conservative figure who often attacks people who don’t conform to his ideas of what comprises the proper expression of gender and sexuality. This year he’s been on a mission, in his words, to wage “an all out assault on gender ideology.”
To that end, he’s been working on an obviously insincere documentary that critics say will incite further transphobia in which he “investigates” how to define “woman.” Soon after Walsh released the trailer for What is a Woman?, a friend told Steph Kyriacou that it includes an image of him.”
/https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/ade7b82fa9b5a22bae4e949f081a2403/Uvalde%20Abbott%20Presser%2005.jpg)
Scottie's Playtime 
